Unfortunately a meeting today will stop me from joining in the oddly but hopefully not ironically hashtagged #HSJtwitchat. So here are a few things reading the Cogitamus report made me think about.

Section four (thought leadership) is absolutely key

I don’t think this can be overstated. In my three years in the NHS nothing, other than the statutory reforms, has lead to change not matter how big or small without leaders championing the cause. Having a range of individuals who can lead the discussion, provide viewpoints, evidence and counterpoints to detractors enables the rest of staff to see the need for change and start to work towards it.

Who ‘owns’ social media

This question breaks down into control of what is said and control of publishing.

Communications teams role is to be the hub of expertise on how these things work, interact, damage and improve. They should be enablers. They can’t own the social media brand but they can lead it.

Social media is here to stay

This will be said time and again. The point being that this has reminded me that social media practitioners across all organisations surveyed are coalescing around this point and are realising its implications.

If social media is here to stay then for organisations to take advantage of its benefits it needs resource, capacity and capability given to it. How is the NHS going to build these things around social media (whatever platforms exist now and in the future) when comms teams are being decreased in size and social media expertise is spread thinly across it’s 1 million plus staff?

His essay, entitled ‘Britain needs a wake-up call’, highlights what such a ministerial position requires – a wide, wide angle view of the world. A view of specific generalisations that help individuals as single nodes in the humongous worldwide system of business, economics, politics, workforces education and health understand what is going on.

There will always be friction between people who naturally look at change on an individual basis and people who naturally look at change as Jeremy has to everyday, on a big picture basis.

Take for example the withholding of expensive cancer drugs from individuals. One angle shows it to be a great injustice deigning someone a longer life, the other an injustice of spending limited money on an individual’s illness instead of many individuals illnesses or preventative measures. Extremely difficult indeed. I shall leave the rest of that point to the philosophers amongst you.

A few facts and more thoughts the essay sent my way

• Currently the British government is currently borrowing £400 million a day
• The British people are getting very close to spending £1 billion (£1,000 million) every single week on paying the interest on our debt <<< Wow!
• Schemes like ERASMUS and travel abroad will be key in the future to ensure the British workforce stays at the top of the tree through knowledge of the world’s different cultures and traditions
• Foreign languages will be very important in the future. The British’s general ambivalence towards foreign language at schools will come back to haunt us if we’re not careful
• Jeremy relabelled Western values as universal values – those of free speech, free trade and free societies. A good and clever linguistic trick perhaps?
• There is a change of mindset needed in UK society. A change to understand how globalised the world is and an acceptance that we are competing in a global workforce
• The logical conclusion of globalisation of the workforce (to me) is the commoditisation of professions. Doctors and engineers will not be able to hold onto the high regard of their profession once there are thousands of graduates from across the world with the same and better skills as British graduate, they just be another x or y. Commercial bodies will be able to salary off positions as they draw down from a global pool of highly educated talent. How can that fit with our societal views and values?
• And finally, how does the need for a better global understanding and position from Britain affect the potential devolution of Scotland and then Wales? Would these countries truly be able to compete in a global world?

“I honestly don’t think it matters whether that [NHS care] care is delivered in a state hospital or a privately operated GP surgery.”

I highlight it not because it is a very insightful article but because this is the first time I have seen a GP surgery being classed as private by a politician.

To often for my liking GPs are seen as the guardians of the NHS despite being private contractors. They are not part of the NHS but an extremely key partner, just like the private sector already is through contracts to help the NHS get through its elective waiting lists.

Politicians would do well to help the public understand that GPs don’t necessarily always hold the NHS’ best interests at heart. After all they too are running a business, a business that has to make a profit.

Why we need a national framework for patient experience

This framework is designed to ‘to apply a single generic framework for patient experience to a wide range of health conditions and settings’. Jocelyn sets out well the challenges that stand in the way of getting the framework adopted across the NHS.

One she doesn’t explore fully is the engagement staff who may well own patient experience questionnaires as part of their work. In my experience NHS engagement professionals are often extremely wary of change preferring to stay within the comfortable boundaries of face-to-face meetings (during work hours) or presentations in town halls to audiences of older people and the usual community champion suspects.

Implementing the framework without a top-down dictat will require a huge amount of engagement work with NHS engagement professionals to teach them that their local population isn’t that different from others and that the same questions across the nation apply to them too. After all a knee op is a knee op in Newcastle or Bristol.

The framework is a great step towards pushing patient experience up the agenda and I hope comms and engagement staff across the NHS embrace it and become experts in it alongside their clinical colleagues.

Ruth Carnall give us her views on Health and Wellbeing Boards in London

While the context may not be of interest to many (even though HWBs offer a lot to think about and act upon, especially integrated care) the point of me showing you this is to break down how easy it is:

Film Ruth answering 3-4 questions with a Flipcam

Download the films to my laptop

Use basic Windows Movie Maker to cut them together

Insert a couple of fade outs and fade ins

Publish (wait a while as your processor works hard)

Upload to YouTube

Promote: Tweet, embed and share with staff and colleagues.

Total time taken to get all this done? About 2 hours. Easy!

Hint: Make sure the interviewer asks the interviewee to repeat the question in their answer and tell the interviewee not to jump straight in after the answer has finished so editing is made easier.

NB: Windows Movie Maker is included on most, if not all, Windows laptop and desktop packages, but is nowehere near as good as Final Cut or Final Cut Pro on a Mac

National Citizen Service (NCS)

This government initiative is an opportunity for 16 year olds to explore their skills, likes and dislikes through outdoor pursuits, helping their communities and creative endeavours such as making short films.

A lot of thinking is currently going into how to make the most of the talent, energy and enthusiasm that British youth have and I like the sound of NCS as part of the answer.

It doesn’t prescribe a right and wrong Q&A style education like exams, it enables participants to learn through making mistakes (e.g. do taking the right gear when hiking) and gives them the freedom to be creative and explore what makes them tick, something the school system doesn’t do very often. Additionally, as the programme looks to add value to their CV, helping them show the breadth of experience required these days on job and university applications.

Covering the categories of photography, illustration, informational posters and graphics, interactive games and videos the competition winners just goes to show how important visualising science and not just writing about it is. The pictures even got a raise of interest from a few non-science colleagues.

Also, it’s great to see that software is helping make science more interactive and ‘real’ to an audience of non-scientists and enthusiasts.

One for the reading list this but it sneaks into the read round-up as I’ve read the first few pages with great interest.

As I understand it an asset approach is effectively a look at how partnerships between individuals, public sector organisation and private sector organisations can look for the existing positives in communities and seek to maximise them in time and space (positive things happening more often over wider areas).

As the publications says: ‘The asset approach values the capacity, skills, knowledge, connections and potential in a community. It doesn’t only see the problems that need fixing and the gaps that need filling. In an asset approach, the glass is half-full rather than half empty.’

On first look the asset based approach looks to complement the growth of thinking around complexity and how people and organisations interact with each other. So I reckon it is worth a read and a mull over.

Mark Spencer has stuck his head over a political and clinical parapet no politician has publicly dared to yet, full marks to him.

The is limited, if not no understanding in the wider English public of how the NHS works and how it could work better in the future.

The NHS must reform, now (that does not say I agree or disagree with the current plans) and it is key that the public are spoken to and with by people in positions of knowledge so that the public can make an informed democratic decision.

The General Medical Council takes on social media

It is great to see often seen as an inward facing and conservative organisation approaching social media openly especially as they have been brave enough to give a relative newbie the chance to educate his peers. It is also good to see the leaders of tomorrow at the GMC are engaged with social media, its positives, negatives and potential.

On an aside this serves as another example that social media and digital communications offers a great way for young people to get noticed and present themselves as ones to watch for the future.

I’m also glad to see that medical and non-medical education is mentioned and seen to be key to the wider NHS picking up social media more widely and with less apprehension.

However, all that said the tone of some of the article is a shame:

“Inappropriate use of social media can raise questions about your suitability to become a doctor, which could result in your medical school launching a fitness to practise investigation into your conduct. Your medical school is not allowed to let you graduate if you are not fit to practise. This is a last resort and would only happen in the most serious of cases.”

While a very important part of considering social media’s role in healthcare why did the article need to concentrate so much on this aspect? Why not accentuate the positives from Craig’s experiences. I smell an older colleagues hand in the editor chair here.

Overall a great step in the right direction. Perhaps the next article could be from an older doctor who uses social media and direct people to where they can learn about the positives of social media in healthcare.

One thing which stands out for me is the driver behind the adopters of social media – many of them pick up social media to engage with a wider community to garner better ideas and promote idea sharing. So there are some good examples in there which I think could be useful to share with colleagues and promote the use of social media.

This is an interesting article on the BBC website on depression and resilience to it. It’s a good piece of science communication I think, talking about the people and their lives before the science words flow.

I find mental health and specifically the treatments for common conditions interesting and it’s good to see the R&D side get some coverage. With the recession and winter biting at our heels it is nice to know researchers in Manchester are looking at how we can do better when depression comes a-calling.

If you’re looking for somewhere you can learn a little more about the things you can do on a daily basis to help prevent depression have a look at Moodscope – a good mood trend analysis tool and source of hints and tips.

A nice little post from the 21st December 2011 on healthworkscollective.com describing how groups of Paediatricians across New York State (53,000 sq miles in area, over 300 miles from north to south) have started using Google+ Hangout to enable them to have bigger and better meetings. Taking the focus away from just those Paediatricians in Manhattan and giving those across the state a chance to share ideas and knowledge. The post includes a top 5 tips for using Google+ Hangout.

Do any UK clinicians use this at the moment? Do you think it could be a valuable addition to your Continuous Professional Development training and networking?
As a non-clinician I certainly think a Google+ hangout with a few of my peers would be useful, but only if there was a good chair and a solid agenda.

‘Spam volume dropped from more than 379 billion messages daily to about 124 billion messages daily between August 2010 and November 2011—levels not seen since 2007 —as law enforcement and security agencies shut down major spam-sending botnets, according to Cisco. In September 2011, India was generating the highest percentage of spam volume (13.9%). Vietnam was second with 8% and the Russian Federation was third with 7.8%.’Source: Cisco Connected World Technology Report

Spam is not an area of computing I understand at all but the numbers in the above are incredible, almost fantastical, so I thought I’d share nonetheless.

Lucifer’s Boob
A 32 year-old friend of a colleague was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and has decided to write a blog about her experiences. Whilst the subject matter is fairly grim she manages to make the blog funny and it’s full of pathos without being overly emotional. She is also very honest about the NHS and has pretty much nothing but praise for all concerned.
Give it a look and I hope it helps to show the power of the written (digital word).http://lucifersboob.blogspot.com/
P.s. Read it from the bottom, as it’s in chronological order.

Stand outs for me are:
• Parents of 10 year olds (Facebook don’t allow children under 13 to sign up) are signing their children up for them
• 55% of active Twitter users access the service from their mobile (it’d be interesting to know if they also use desktop and laptops and which is most popular by minutes spent on Twitter/Tweetdeck/Other management software/webpage)
• 56% of college students said that if they were offered a job by a company that banned social media use, they’d turn it down  how is the NHS going to ensure that it gets and retains the top digital talent needed to provide world class digital healthcare services and informations?

I hope you enjoyed the first ATT read-round-up of 2012. I hope to get a few more published over the coming months. Happy New Year to you all let 2012 be a happy one!